Wear It Well

If you want to consider the ‘radical unicorn’ look (thanks again Chris Moran) you can stick them on to your helmet or goggles but be aware, it’s not quite as simple as simply just whacking it on and pressing ‘on.’ I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen hordes of ‘goprosapiens’ cruising around, cameras blissfully pointing at the sky; I can only wonder at how stoked their relatives will be when they get the chance to watch hours of cloud-cam when they’re home after the holidays.

A good tip is to mount the camera on your helmet before you put it on your head. Get the mount near the front, not bang on the top like a teletubby. When you’re filming helmet-cam the most exciting action will be happening roughly two-to-three metres in front of you, so angle the camera down so that a straight line drawn from the centre of the lens will intersect a similar line drawn from your eyes a couple of metres away. That way, you’ll be recording what you’re looking at, easy!

N.B. Seeing as we’re snowboarders and spend most of the time standing sideways, chest mounts aren’t always the best option for getting those point of view (P.O.V.) shots. Unless you’re going to spend most of your time practising falling leaf, in which case go for it!

Stay On Point

There’s nothing worse than getting home to check out your day’s footage and finding that you’ve cropped out everyone’s heads and/or boards, easy to do when you’re trying to keep close and concentrate on riding at the same time. To make things simple, just follow this top tip: focus on your friend’s crotch.

Strange but true, if you aim the lens at your subject’s junk it helps you keep the camera focused roughly at their middle, keeping head-to-toe within shot. But if you have to compromise, it’s best to aim to give a little more screen time to the bottom half; it’s frustrating watching rail edits where you can’t see the board because then you probably can’t make out the trick.

And whilst we’re talking about crotches… Again as we spend our time sideways on to the hill it’s worth giving a little thought to how your subject is orientated with the rail. Think of how the riders’ stance and trick choice will affect which way they’re facing, much better to have their face in shot than their ass.

Steady Hands Make Light Work

Shaky footage is just as annoying to watch as only having half the action. Check out this edit of Lewis Sonvico – great riding but after a while the possibly caffeine-induced camera shake gets more than a little off-putting.

Again a pole helps, just loosen your grip a little and try and absorb any shaking in your hand and wrist. I once did some filming with a guy who literally couldn’t stop his hands from shaking when he got excited watching someone’s riding. To try and help I built my own glide-cam rig with a few DIY gimbal joints; you don’t have to go to such extreme lengths but try and keep it in mind when filming.

Get The Light Right

Action cameras are so good at what they do. They’re convenient, rugged and versatile. But once they are taken out of the conditions they’re optimised for they may not provide such great footage. One important factor to consider is lighting, especially when it comes to on snow. Whilst snowdomes provide pretty consistent lighting conditions, the ever-changing mountains do not. In flat light (cloudy or foggy conditions) where there are no features, buildings or trees to provide shadows and contrast a lot of visual information can get lost. This can lead to shots where it looks like the riders are just floating about in a cloud. But if you’re up the hill in those kinds of conditions, filming is likely to be one of your last priorities.

The latest GoPros come with a range of settings for different lighting conditions – if you’re filming in low light it is probably to your advantage that you select that very option in the settings menu. There’s also an option labelled ‘spot metering’, this only uses information from the centre of the frame to get the right settings so it’s useful if you’re filming through a window from a dark room, or through a hole into a bright space.

Another thing mini-action cams find difficult to deal with is being pointed directly at the sun. As well as silhouetting whatever you’re filming at the time, it can lead to side effects such as lens flare and/or vertical purple lines on-screen (the digital version of lens flare). Sometimes these effects can be desirable to create an atmosphere in an edit, but if they’re not for you quite yet think about where the sun is whilst setting up to film.

N.B. – pointing your camera at the sun for extended periods of time, i.e. while filming a time lapse, can permanently damage its sensor.

Get The Numbers Right

You may notice the whole host of different settings your new camera comes with and it is important to get to grips with what they mean if you want to make the most of them. When it comes to resolution or frame rate for instance, the instinct is to go for the “bigger is better” approach, but it will save you an unbelievable amount of time in the editing stage if you make sure as much of the footage as possible is shot with the same settings. So which is best?

We’re now going to have to get nerdy I’m afraid, but this is as nerdy as this article gets, I promise! 720p, 1080p and now 2k and 4k are different resolution sizes. They refer to the number of pixels on the vertical axis of your square frame to be exact. 1080 is officially HD, but in actual fact 720 is good enough for most computers and is still the standard for web players like Vimeo. You’d only notice the difference on a pretty substantial TV screen and if you film on 720 you’ll save yourself a whole heap of memory.

GoPros now go even as high as 4k which is cinema resolution, but unless you’re actually shooting for a feature film this is probably a bit excessive. The frame rate is the other number you need to worry about. It refers to the number of pictures taken per second by the sensor. Most humans find it hard to detect any frame speeds higher thanaround 25fps with the naked eye, so unless you’re planning to go slo-mo, you won’t need anything faster. But when it comes to slo-mo, the higher the frame rate the more you can slow it down before the footage starts going juddery. So 50fps or 60 fps will be the standard slo-mo setting, while filming at 100 or 120 will allow you to slow everything right down. The newly released 240 fps setting can be slowed down to 10% (one second of footage becomes ten) without it getting juddery. Simple really.

There’s More To Life Than Snowboarding!

One thing snowboarders tend to forget is how versatile action cams are, and how good they are at shooting stuff that’s not snowboarding. One thing that can really help make an edit stand out from the crowd is some well thought out ‘lifestyle’ footage. If your camera’s waterproof, why not chuck it in the holiday hot tub and see what happens?

If it’s reasonably shock proof you can hang it out a car window and reach other angles you wouldn’t trust a more expensive camera to get to. Check out this photo taken with a GoPro hanging off a toy kite by a good friend of mine: Tom Akass. It’s a cool different angle, and certainly a hell of a lot cheaper than buying a helicopter!

Get Creative!

The best thing about these cameras is how easily you can get creative with them; as we’ll get on to in later articles, once you start using more advanced equipment and techniques you may start to see them as quite limiting, but being limited only fuels your imagination.

Check out this mini-edit from Eric Willet and Sage Kotsenburg for an idea of a new way to utilise yours. Or Tim Humphreys, master of the selfie. The sky’s the limit so get out there and get filming!

For advice on what to kit your GoPro out with, check out this list of the top 10 GoPro accessories here.

THIS ARTICLE IS PART OF A SERIES ON HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR EDITS, YOU CAN FIND THE REST OF THE ARTICLES HERE:

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